Everything Flows by Vasily Grossman

This is one of the twentieth century's most powerful and illuminating books, brilliantly translated and annotated by Robert Chandler.

Besides the beauty of his writing, Grossman's strength lies in his gentleness. He portrays humanity at its most vicious while asking for understanding - even for those who betrayed their comrades during the terror. Judge not...

Unusually and probably uniquely among male Soviet writers, he focuses on life for women prisoners in the gulag. His hero, Ivan Grigoryevich concludes that 'in the camps of Kolyma, men were not equal to women. Men, really, had it easier.'

The chapter on the holodomor (the terror-famine of 1932-3 in Ukraine and Southern Russia which killed unknown millions) will remain with me forever. The hero's lover, Anna Sergeyevna, relates what she witnessed as chairman of a collective farm after the forced seizure of grain from the peasants. A few children managed to literally crawl past police guards (placed to prevent the starving from reaching the towns). but they died on the streets, sometimes kicked and beaten by those who had already lost their humanity. Sometimes they died with food beside them, dropped by compassionate passers-by. They were too close to death to even see it.

All my great aunts and uncles-in-law died this way.

Parts of Everything Flows may be almost unbearable to read, yet their truth is compelling. We all contain within us the potential to become a saint or a Stalin - and Grossman shows how we respond to different pressures in different ways. For me, this is not a book about the suffering, cruelty and blindness of other people in another time; it is the human condition laid bare. And Grossman asks for understanding of it, presumably in the knowledge that is only through such deep self-understanding that we stand a hell's chance of rising above such situations now and in the future.